Yee, a Democrat representing San Francisco and a portion of San Mateo County, participated in a discussion with the undercover agents about an illegal gun-trafficking deal at one point. Yee was one of 26 people arrested after a lengthy racketeering, gun-running and money laundering investigation that also targeted Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow, a notorious former San Francisco gangster. Yee was charged in U.S. District Court with conspiracy to traffic in firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms, as well as with participating in a scheme to defraud citizens of honest services.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

While hard numbers are not available, evangelical leaders on both sides of the divide on Israel agree that members of the millennial generation do not share their parents’ passion for the Jewish state; many are seeking some form of even-handedness when approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “What is happening is that the hard line of Christian Zionists was not successfully passed forward to the next generation, because it was based on theological themes that are now being questioned by younger evangelicals,” said David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics and director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University in Atlanta. The grip of Christian Zionists over young evangelicals has been loosening for several years, according to observers within the community. But recently, the leading evangelical pro-Israel organization, Christians United for Israel, has set off alarm bells in articles and interviews decrying the inroads made by pro-Palestinian activists into the evangelical community. In June 2011, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey among evangelical leaders convened in Cape Town, South Africa, for the third Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization. The findings indicated lower support for Israel than previously believed. A majority of American evangelical leaders (49%) expressed neutrality when asked if they sympathize more with Israelis or with Palestinians. Thirty percent expressed support for Israelis, 13% for the Palestinians.

The 10 happiest countries in the world are Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Austria, Iceland and Australia. Not surprisingly, none of these countries are in Africa or Latin America.

The Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics is still collecting data for those who left in 2013, but it estimates that the numbers are about the same. While Puerto Ricans have migrated to the United States for several generations, the number of departures from 2000-2010 marks the largest migration wave, at 300,000, since the 1950s, when close to a half-million migrated to the mainland during the entire decade. So many residents have left the island over the years that there are a million more Puerto Ricans living in the United States (4.9 million as of 2011) than in Puerto Rico (3.7 million). Puerto Rico's unemployment rate is above 15%, more than double the 7.3% in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Recently, Standard & Poor's announced that it had cut Puerto Rico's credit rating to junk status as the Hispanic island faces $70 billion in debt, including the debt from its utility companies. In an attempt to avoid financial ruin, Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro García Padilla has signed a bill authorizing the sale of $3.5 million in tax-free general obligation bonds. Even if the auction is successful, the bonds are considered pretty risky. Basic monthly utilities including electricity, heating and water cost about $246 in Puerto Rico as opposed to New York City's $161. Puerto Ricans aren't just moving to New York, where many have typically migrated in the past. They are also moving to Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia - wherever there are jobs.

The 14-year-old black suspect, has been identified as Kathon Anderson and is being charged as an adult with second degree murder, Criminal Possession of a Weapon and Criminal Use of a Firearm. He has been arraigned. The black suspect boarded the bus to go after a rival gang member, but instead hit 39-year-old Angel Rojas in the head. Rojas was rushed to Woodhull Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The black teenager was arrested at the scene while commuters scrambled to get out of the way. A firearm was recovered. The black teen fired one shot on the bus and several more outside. Six shell casings were found at the scene. The shooting appears to be gang related, and authorities say that the intended target was a member of a rival gang who had been taunting him on social media. The black teen has a prior arrest for an assault as a hate crime in 2011. He was charged as a minor, and the arrest is sealed. Rojas came to the United States four years ago from the Dominican Republic with his wife Maria and the couple's two children, 12-year-old Saury and 8-year-old Abril. This killing is one reason why the NYPD needs to aggressively implement its Stop-Question-and-Frisk program.

Police rescued three young children who showed signs of starvation and abuse from their home in Salinas. Their lesbian mothers, who lived together as domestic partners, are in custody. The oldest child, an 8-year-old girl, had been chained at times to keep her from getting food, looked like a concentration camp victim. The girl was hospitalized for four days and is now recuperating in a foster home. The other two children are boys ages 3 and 5, and they, too, were malnourished, bruised, and showed signs of emotional abuse. But the girl apparently bore the brunt of the abuse, with investigators saying that she was shackled at the ankle or by a collar at times, and may have been held in a closet. Eraca Craig, 31, and Christian Deanda, 44, are accused of felony child cruelty, false imprisonment, and other charges. They were scheduled to be married soon.

Men from the far north of Scotland were most likely to provide a direct match with almost a third (29.2%) of the men from the Shetland Islands testing positive for Viking blood. "Despite arriving well over 1,000 years ago the Viking legacy still remains strong in Britain and Ireland," said Dr Jim Wilson, chief scientist at BritainsDNA which carried out the test. Researchers compared Y chromosome markers, which are inherited from father to son, from more than 3,500 men to six DNA patterns rarely found outside the Norse warrior's native Norway and Sweden. Other areas that scored highly included the Orkney Islands (25.2%), Caithness (17.5%) and the Isle of Man (12.3%). Some 930,000 were a direct match. The study only tested men whose grandfathers had lived in the same areas. Dr Jim Wilson added: "The research suggests that the concentration of Norse blood is quite variable, but as the Y chromosome only relates to the nation's male population and only to one ancestral lineage for each man, there is a very real chance that many more of us are related to the Vikings."

Friday, March 21, 2014

But male MPs voted to amend the new marriage bill to allow men to take as many wives as they like without consulting existing spouses. Traditionally, first wives are supposed to give prior approval. About 30 of Kenya's 69 female MPs were in the 349-member chamber for the debate but were outnumbered by their male counterparts. The women walked out in disgust over the matter. The marriage bill now passes to the president to sign before it becomes law. MP Samuel Chepkong'a, who proposed the amendment, said that when a woman got married under customary law, she understood that the marriage was open to polygamy, so no consultation was necessary. Mohammed Junet, an MP representing a constituency from the western Nyanza province, agreed. "When you marry an African woman, she must know the second one is on the way and a third wife… this is Africa," he said.

Black children represent about 18% of children in preschool programs in schools, but they make up almost half of the preschoolers who are suspended more than once. Black students of all ages are suspended and expelled at a rate that's three times higher than that of white children. Even as boys receive more than two-thirds of suspensions, black girls are suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or most boys.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Jonathan Tebbs, 46, stabbed dedicated town hall chief Kate Dixon 29 times with a Swiss Army knife before reading an Oscar Wilde poem about a man who kills his wife. He stripped her clothes off and calmly carried her into the shower where he washed the blood from her lifeless body at a flat in Streatham, south London.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Authorities in the Western state of Michoacan have revealed that they have arrested Manuel Plancarte Gaspar, the nephew of one of the top leaders of the Knights Templar cartel, for his involvement. Gaspar and his cohorts would take their young captives to rented homes with medical equipment and remove their organs. Police say that the cases dated back several years. Once word of the arrest broke, a leader in a local vigilante group told a radio station that several children had been rescued from a cartel van in his town. "They were inside a refrigerated box, tightly wrapped in blankets," he said. All hailed from the same Mexico City school, and were abducted during a beach outing. The Templar cartel has for years been diversifying its operations beyond drugs; it now makes most of its money from illegal mining, logging, and extortion.

But separating the associations between who we are and where we come from, and genetic variations that cause disease, can be difficult and often result in false genetic study leads. A new statistical method, developed by researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, can help those who study the human genome better identify ancestry as they go about isolating the genes that cause disease. The LASER (Locating Ancestry from SEquence Reads) software can establish ancestry using very small amounts of sequence data, scattered across 1% to 10% of the genome and adding only a few dollars to the cost of a genetic analysis. "You can use our method to describe the ancestry of an individual very precisely, even separating individuals from different parts of Finland," said Goncalo Abecasis, the Felix E. Moore Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at U-M. "In studies of genetic diseases, this information helps separate changes that cause disease from more numerous changes that specify ancestry."

Monday, March 17, 2014

MigrationWatch UK, which campaigns against mass immigration, said that in 2011 the costs were equivalent to £3,000 for each of the eight million foreign-born people living in Britain. Immigration between 1995 and 2011 cost the British taxpayer more than £140 billion, or £22 million a day, after balancing what immigrants pay in tax with what they take out of Britain’s coffers by claiming benefits and tax credits. In 2011 alone the cost was £23 billion, or £3,000 each for the eight million foreign-born population. The sum was equal to the amount spent by the NHS on GPs and dentists in a year.

Tilus Lebrun, 36, was arrested after he fatally stabbed restaurant owner Dimitrios Karaloukas because the boss took a photo of him without his permission. Lebrun worked at Jimmy The Greek Taverna Restaurant in Boca Raton, where he pulled out a knife and stabbed the restaurant’s 61-year-old owner. The owner was sitting down in the restaurant when he was attacked by Lebrun. He was stabbed three times on his left side and once in his back and later died of his injuries. An unidentified male who was an employee at the restaurant was also attacked by Lebrun. The victim was stabbed numerous times and is undergoing life-saving surgery at Delray Medical Center. Deputies found Lebrun near the restaurant outside wearing an apron and holding a large knife. He later told deputies, “I killed him because he took my photograph on March 2nd and posted it on the Internet,” according to authorities. Lebrun has been charged with first degree premeditated murder and murder while engaged in a certain felony offense.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Police received a phone call from a hysterical female saying that her infant child was bleeding from its nose. Doctors determined that the infant’s nose had been severed and that the child had possible head trauma. Later, doctors determined that the 1-month-old infant had a skull fracture, a brain hemorrhage, and a third of the child’s nose had been severed off. The father, Joshua Cooper, had bitten his son’s nose off out of frustration over the infant crying. It was unclear how the child suffered the fractured skull and brain hemorrhage. Cooper has been arrested and charged with child cruelty and aggravated mayhem.

Of the 5,096 students accepted by eight specialized schools, just 5% were black and 7% were Hispanic. Nationally recognized Staten Island Tech won’t have a single black student among its incoming class of 344 freshmen. Last year, it had five. Bronx Science, consistently ranked one of the highest-achieving high schools in the city, sent admission letters to 968 middle-school students, but only 18 were black. The story was much the same at Stuyvesant, where seven black students and 21 Hispanics were among the 952 who made the cut. Even Brooklyn Tech, which Mayor de Blasio’s son, Dante, attends, will welcome just 127 black students and 130 Hispanics among 1,844 in its freshman class of ’14. Of 27,817 students who took the entrance test last October, 46% were black or Hispanic. That’s up from 43% in 2012.

Previous research has shown that northern Europeans and people with northern European ancestry, as well as populations from Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Central Asia with a tradition of fresh milk production and consumption, continue to express the lactase enzyme into adulthood. Some of these earlier studies had traced the genetic origin of this trait in Europeans to a particular mutation that regulates the expression of the gene that codes for lactase. And in 2007 a study examined African populations and found three additional genetic variants associated with lactase persistence that had not been previously identified. But these variants didn't completely account for the reason why some Africans were able to digest milk. To try to reconcile these apparent discrepancies between genotype, the genetic basis of a characteristic, and phenotype, the characteristic itself, researchers led field studies to often-remote areas of Kenya, Tanzania and Sudan to collect blood samples and perform a lactose tolerance test on people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The idea was that the researchers wanted to sample as many populations, and as diverse a set of populations, as possible. They included pastoralists, agro-pastoralists, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers, so the four major subsistence patterns were all covered. To look for genetic variations among the populations' abilities to digest milk, the team sequenced three genomic regions thought to influence the activity of the lactase-encoding LCT gene in 819 Africans from 63 different populations and 154 non-Africans from nine different populations in Europe, the Middle East and Central and East Asia. They also examined the results of the lactose tolerance test in 513 people from 50 populations in East Africa. Their sequencing and phenotyping efforts confirmed the association between lactase persistence and three known single–nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, places where the DNA sequence varies in just one "letter." But they also identified two new SNPs associated with the trait located in regions that are thought to regulate lactase gene expression. Their analysis revealed strong evidence of recent positive selection affecting several variants associated with lactase persistence in African populations, likely in response to the cultural development of pastoralism. The distinct geographic patterns in which these variants were present correlate in many cases with historic human migrations, mixing between populations as well as the spread of cattle, camels or sheep. For example, they found the variant associated with lactase persistence in Europeans, T-13910, in central and northern African pastoralist groups, suggesting that these groups may have mixed historically with a non-African population. The age of this genetic mutation is estimated to be 5,000-12,300 years old, coinciding with the origins of cattle domestication in North Africa and the Middle East. And a variant, G-13915, found at high frequencies in the Arabian Peninsula, and also present in northern Kenya and northern Sudan, dates to roughly 5,000 years ago, around the time that archaeological evidence suggests that camels were domesticated in the region. Another variant, G-13907, was identified in the northern reaches of Sudan and Kenya as well as in Ethiopia. The researchers speculate that the mutation may have arisen in Cushitic populations in Ethiopia, who later migrated into Kenya and Sudan in the last 5,000 years. They observed still another variant, C-14010, in Tanzania and Kenya as well as in southern Africa. This variant is believed to have arisen 3,000 to 7,000 years ago, a timing in line with the migration of pastoralists from North Africa into East Africa. The researchers' analysis suggests that this variant spread more recently into southern Africa, perhaps only in the last 1,000 years. Even with the new variants that the team identified, there were still patterns that the genetic data couldn't explain. Some groups that appeared to be able to digest milk lacked any genetic sign of this ability. The Hadza, nearly half of whom had the lactase persistence trait, are one example.
This raises the strong possibility that there are other variants out there, perhaps in regions of the genome that haven't yet been examined. Another possibility is that commensal bacteria in the gut could offer humans a helping hand in digesting milk. The team is now assaying Africans' gut bacteria to see if that might be the case.

The research suggests that as people age, their ability to absorb or process protein may decline. To compensate for this loss, protein requirements may increase with age. Due to increasing life expectancies in many countries, increasing numbers of elderly people are living with functional decline, such as declines in cognitive ability and activities of daily living. This can have profound effects on the health and well-being of older adults and their caregivers, as well as on health care resources. Researchers found that men in the highest quartile of animal protein intake had a 39% decreased chance of experiencing higher-level functional decline than those in the lowest quartile. These associations were not seen in women. No consistent association was observed between plant protein intake and future higher-level functional decline in either sex.

Oxford University researchers based their finding on an analysis of the General Social Survey, a nationally representative public opinion survey carried out in the United States every one to two years. The authors say that one explanation could be that more intelligent individuals are better at judging character and so they tend to form relationships with people who are less likely to betray them. Another reason could be that smarter individuals are better at weighing up situations, recognising when there is a strong incentive for the other person not to meet their side of the deal. The study supports previous research that analysed data on trust and intelligence from European countries. The authors say that the research is significant because social trust contributes to the success of important social institutions, such as welfare systems and financial markets. In addition, research shows that individuals who trust others report better health and greater happiness. The Oxford researchers found, however, that the links between trust and health, and between trust and happiness, are not explained by intelligence. For example, individuals who trust others might have only reported better health and greater happiness because they were more intelligent. But this turns out not to be the case. The finding confirms that trust is a valuable resource for an individual, and is not simply a proxy for intelligence. Lead author Noah Carl, from the Department of Sociology, said: "Intelligence is shown to be linked with trusting others, even after taking into account factors like marital status, education and income. This finding supports what other researchers have argued, namely that being a good judge of character is a distinct part of human intelligence which evolved through natural selection. However, there are other possible interpretations of the evidence, and further research is needed to disentangle them." Researcher Professor Francesco Billari, also from the Department of Sociology, said: "People who trust others seem to report better health and greater happiness. The study of social trust therefore has wider implications in public health, governmental policy and private charity, and there are good reasons to think that governments, religious groups and other civic organisations should try to cultivate more trust in society. Social trust has become an increasingly important topic for academics, who want to understand the causes of better health and greater happiness within society."

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Researchers took blood samples from 767 people from 76 families, ranging in age from seven to 94 years. Some families had a strong musical tradition, boasting several professional players. The scientists unravelled the genetic code from the samples and carried out a comparison between the volunteers, looking for variants in their DNA. They also asked the volunteers to do three musical tests. The guinea pigs were asked to distinguish between notes that had slightly different tones and durations, and to identify sequences of notes that were subtly different from each other. Among those who performed well in these tests, the big standout was tiny but significant differences in several genes located on Chromosome 4 which help determine how we hear and perceive sound. One variant lies on a gene called GATA2, which is important for the hair cells in the inner ear. The delicate fibres on these cells move in response to different frequencies and transmit a signal through the auditory nerve to the brain. Another telltale variant was found in a gene called PCDH7, which plays an important role in a part of the brain called the amygdala — believed to be the driver for how we transform sounds into patterns.

Seniors account for 264,000 of the 1.3 million people on the island receiving help under the Puerto Rican equivalent of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Together, people in the over-60 and under-18 age cohorts total more than half of the food stamp recipients in the U.S. commonwealth, the director of Puerto Rico's Administration for the Socioeconomic Development of the Family, Marta Elsa Fernández, said. She pointed out that Puerto Rico "is a poor country" and that therefore it is understandable that 1.3 million of the island's 3.7 million residents would qualify for help. By the standards of the U.S. mainland, 45% of Puerto Ricans are poor, Fernández said. The increase in unemployment - which already exceeds 15% - and especially the fact that seniors are losing other types of public aid is increasingly pushing people over 60 to request food stamps, which they then share among their other younger family members. Regarding the amount of the aid, Fernández said that, on average, each of the recipients receives $112 per month, while for a family of four that amount rises to $400. Fernández said that her agency is rigorous when it comes to approving such aid, adding that each year all people who receive food stamps are subjected to a rigorous analysis. Her agency has been allocated $1.9 billion for the current fiscal year to distribute food stamps among the Puerto Rican population.

Anthropologists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and geneticists at University College London (UCL), working in collaboration with archaeologists from Berlin and Kiev, have analyzed ancient DNA from skeletons and found that selection has had a significant effect on the human genome even in the past 5,000 years, resulting in sustained changes to the appearance of people:

While investigating numerous genetic markers in archaeological and living individuals, Sandra Wilde of the Palaeogenetics Group at the JGU Institute of Anthropology noticed striking differences in genes associated with hair, skin, and eye pigmentation. "Prehistoric Europeans in the region we studied would have been consistently darker than their descendants today," says Wilde, first author of the PNAS article. "This is particularly interesting as the darker phenotype seems to have been preferred by evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. All our early ancestors were more darkly pigmented." However, things must have changed in the last 50,000 years as humans began to migrate to northern latitudes.

"In Europe we find a particularly wide range of genetic variation in terms of pigmentation," adds co-author Dr. Karola Kirsanow, who is also a member of the Palaeogenetics Group at Mainz University. "However, we did not expect to find that natural selection had been favoring lighter pigmentation over the past few thousand years." The signals of selection that the Mainz palaeogeneticists and their colleagues at University College London have identified are comparable to those for malaria resistance and lactase persistence, meaning that they are among the most pronounced that have been discovered to date in the human genome. The authors see several possible explanations. "Perhaps the most obvious is that this is the result of adaptation to the reduced level of sunlight in northern latitudes," says Professor Mark Thomas of UCL, corresponding author of the study. "Most people of the world make most of their vitamin D in their skin as a result UV exposure. But at northern latitudes and with dark skin, this would have been less efficient. If people weren't getting much vitamin D in their diet, then having lighter skin may have been the best option."

"But this vitamin D explanation seems less convincing when it comes to hair and eye color," Wilde continues. "Instead, it may be that lighter hair and eye color functioned as a signal indicating group affiliation, which in turn played a role in the selection of a partner." Sexual selection of this kind is common in animals and may also have been one of the driving forces behind human evolution over the past few millennia.

"We were expecting to find that changes in the human genome were the result of population dynamics, such as migration. In general we expect genetic changes due to natural selection to be the exception rather than the rule. At the same time, it cannot be denied that lactase persistence, i.e., the ability to digest the main sugar in milk as an adult, and pigmentation genes have been favored by natural selection to a surprising degree over the last 10,000 years or so," adds Professor Joachim Burger, senior author of the study.

The disease, which the researchers have called PCCA2 (Progressive Cerebello-Cerebral Atrophy Type 2), is caused by two mutations in the VPS53 gene. It results in defective circulation of vacuoles (endosomes) within patents' cells and leads to detrimental excessive storage of "junk" within the cells. Children who contract the disease are seemingly fine at birth and develop well until about six months of age. However, deterioration begins soon after with brain atrophy, severe retardation and epilepsy by age one. One of every 37 Moroccan Jews carries one of the two mutations and based on the high carrier rate, PCCA2 is the most common severe genetic disease in Moroccan Jews discovered to date. Fifteen percent of Israel's total population (1 million people) is of Moroccan ancestry. Nearly 100,000 Moroccan Jews also live in the United States, largely in New York City, Washington D.C., Boston, and Florida. In Israel, carrier testing and prenatal diagnosis of PCCA2 will enable eradication of this severe disease. Routine carrier testing in Moroccan Jews will likely begin within months. PCCA2 is a recessive disease: if both parents are carriers of a VPS53 mutation then there is a 25% risk of the disease in each pregnancy. The research team was led by Prof. Ohad Birk, head of the Genetics Institute at Soroka University Medical Center and the Morris Kahn Lab at the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev at BGU. Birk's research has led to the discovery of more than 20 genetic diseases common in Arabs and in Sephardic Jews, providing insights into the nature of illness and unraveling molecular pathways of normal human development. In 2010, Birk's group discovered another gene for a similar disease, PCCA, which is also common in Jews of Moroccan and Iraqi descent. Birk's translational approach has led to dozens of routine massive genetic carrier tests, prevention and practical eradication of numerous severe neurological disorders common in Arabs and in Sephardic/non-Ashkenazi Jews. "There was an idea that Ashkenazi [of European descent] Jews have more disease than others, but when one begins looking at Sephardic Jewish diseases, they are there," Birk says. "They have just not been sorted out. Because they have not been sorted out, there was no carrier testing, no prevention programs or anything. I have shifted part of my lab into Jewish non-Ashkenazi—or Sephardic Jewish—diseases." Ashkenazi Jewish diseases that now have carrier testing in the United States and Israel include Tay-Sachs disease, Canavan, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, Familial Dysautonomia, Bloom Syndrome, Fanconi anemia, Cystic Fibrosis, and Mucolipidosis IV.

The results on the Common Core Math tests are disturbing for all students, but especially disturbing when broken down by race, ethnicity, and social class. While the percentage of New York City middle school students scoring at proficiency level (Level 3 and 4) dropped for all grades and all groups, it was much steeper for students from minority and poorer families. For example, in the sixth grade, Hispanic students recorded the steepest declines. Their proficiency rate dropped from 50.4 percent in 2012 to 17.4 percent in 2013. Black students had the second largest decline amongst sixth graders. Their proficiency rate dropped from 45.8 percent in 2012 to 15.3 percent in 2013. White and Asian sixth graders declined, but not by as much, and their proficiencies rates were significantly higher at 49.6% and 62%. Larger percentages of White and Asian students scored at the highest proficiency level (4) while larger percentages of Black and Hispanic students scored at the "well below proficient" level (1). The report found that proficiency scores were similar for seventh and eighth grade.

Funny how Asians never end up as victims of the educational system the way blacks and Hispanics do.

Jeri Wright, 48, has been found guilty of 11 counts that included money laundering, lying to federal agents and lying to a grand jury. Her attorney described Wright as a victim of a web spun by longtime friend Regina Evans, the black Country Club Hills police chief who has pleaded guilty to corruption in the case. Evans had secured the state loan for the job-training program but allegedly diverted the money rather than use it for the purpose she proposed. Prosecutor Timothy Bass contended that Wright took as much as $11,000 in cash from more than $30,000 in checks in a scheme where she also sent money back to Evans. Evans tapped the funds for what Bass had called a "spending spree," including a trip to Las Vegas, a basement remodeling and the purchase of vehicles for a security business with her husband.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Rabbi Nathan David (Nosson Dovid) Rabinowich sent explicit electronic messages and also arranged to meet a person whom he thought was a 14-year-old girl for sex in Queens. Rabinowich was originally charged with four sex crimes, including attempted rape, but pleaded guilty to only one count of Attempted Criminal Sex Act-2 on a victim younger than 15-years-old. He was sentenced to a $5,000 fine, 10-years probation and registration as a Level 1 (low level) sex offender.

Detroit police officer Deon Nunlee has been charged with second-degree sexual assault, assault with intent to penetrate and misconduct in office. According to the prosecutor's office, the 31-year-old victim called 911 to report an assault by her boyfriend. When Nunlee and a second officer responded, she told authorities that Nunlee assaulted her in a separate room. "Nunlee took the woman upstairs and his partner remained with the male downstairs," Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy's Office said. "It is alleged that when Nunlee was in an upstairs bedroom with the woman he sexually assaulted her. While they were alone upstairs Nunlee indicated he would be coming back to the house later at 7 a.m. When officer left the house the woman reported the crime to two friends and the next day reported it to the police." Nunlee has been arraigned and held on a $50,000, 10% surety bond.

Intelligence is a complex trait that involves many different genes interacting with each other and with the environment. If one gene changes, the immediate effect may be beneficial, but there will be side effects at other genes, and most of those side effects will likely be harmful. The bigger the effect at any one gene, the greater the likelihood of negative side effects elsewhere.

So evolution has proceeded through tinkering. A small effect here, a small effect there, but nothing that will rock the boat.

We must therefore pool data from many genes to understand the evolution of complex traits like intelligence. This is what Davide Piffer (2013) has done in a recent study. He began with seven genes (SNPs) whose different alleles are associated with differences in intellectual capacity, as measured by PISA or IQ tests. Then, for fifty human populations, he looked up the prevalences of the alleles that seem to increase intellectual capacity. Finally, for each population, he calculated their average prevalence at all seven genes.

The average prevalence was 39% among East Asians, 36% among Europeans, 32% among Amerindians, 24% among Melanesians and Papuan-New Guineans, and 16% among sub-Saharan Africans. The lowest scores were among San Bushmen (6%) and Mbuti Pygmies (5%).

The corrupt Brooklyn black Democrat closed his eyes and held his head with both hands as the jury foreman pronounced him guilty of all 21 counts in the indictment. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Capers then told the judge that Boyland, 43, broke the law even while on trial. FBI agents surveilled him driving in Brooklyn and Manhattan recently despite the suspensions of his license, registration and auto insurance. “I have a concern about Mr. Boyland claiming to be one place when he is actually in another,” U.S. District Judge Sandra Townes said before revoking his $100,000 bail. There’s no doubt where federal inmate No. 18913-076 is now. He faces up to 30 years in prison. The disgraced political scion emptied his pockets for U.S. marshals and left the courtroom without turning back to look at his heartbroken father, former Assemblyman William Boyland Sr., or his mother, who attended every day of the month-long trial. The Boyland political dynasty — in which family members were known as the “Black Kennedys of Brownsville” and a main thoroughfare in the neighborhood was named after Jr.’s late uncle Thomas Boyland, who had held the same assembly seat — has been tarnished. The four-term black assemblyman in Brooklyn's 55th District, represented some of the poorest constituents in New York City and referred to his political office as the family “hardware store” handed down to him by his father and uncle. Boyland fancied himself a Mafia don, and beat a separate corruption rap in 2011. In 2013, he chose to turn down a plea deal worked out by his lawyers. But he wasn’t the Teflon Don after all. The feds had amassed a mountain of evidence on audio and video tape in a sting operation that initially targeted another Brooklyn councilman. FBI agents posed seeking his favors in the Brooklyn Democrat's impoverished community. Boyland brazenly sought payoffs from undercover FBI agents posing as shady businessmen proposing shady real estate schemes in the assemblyman's district. During the 10-month probe, Boyland pocketed more than $14,000 in bribes and demanded a $250,000 payoff in exchange for securing government approvals for the undercover agents. Boyland’s chief of staff, Ry-Ann Hermon, pleaded guilty and testified against about the bribery schemes and how her former boss looted for political purposes from a nonprofit for the elderly. Boyland was also convicted of stealing more than $70,000 in per diem by falsely claiming that he was in Albany when he was actually in New York City and Istanbul, Turkey.

Research shows that HIV prevalence for the group is running at 12.1% a year. It means that a young black gay man becoming sexually active at the age of 18 in the city has a 60% chance of being HIV positive by the age of 30. The research showed that black men who have sex with men (BMSM) are 3.8 times more likely to acquire HIV compared with their white male counterparts.

The survey found that millennials, who range in age from 18 to 33, are more diverse and less trusting than their forebears. They are distinctly liberal on many issues with 60% of them voting for Barack Obama in 2012. It is the only generation in which conservatives don't significantly outnumber liberals. Millennials are more racially diverse than any previous generation; about 43% are not white. Expect that trend to continue in future generations; about half of babies born today are not white (which is probably why so many of them are illegitimate). Millennials are the first generation in the modern era to be worse off in terms of poverty, unemployment, income, and personal wealth than the two previous generations were at the same age. Only 26% are married — compared to 36% of Gen Xers when they were this age, and 48% of Baby Boomers.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Seven of the 10 worst cities for murders also ranked in the top 10 for percentages of black residents: Detroit (1st in black population), Baltimore (2), Memphis (3), New Orleans (4), Atlanta (5), Cleveland (6) and Philadelphia (8). Conversely, 15 of the 25 cities with the lowest murder rates had black populations under 10%.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

The black police officer – a five-year veteran named Eugene Taylor – has been suspended without pay after beating the dog with a mop and strangling it to death. He is charged with animal cruelty and abuse. Taylor, 27, killed his girlfriend’s 7-month-old Jack Russell Terrier, named Rocko, for relieving himself on the carpet of their apartment. Taylor told investigators that he used a mop not only to retrieve the dog from behind the dryer but as a weapon to beat the helpless animal before using his bare hands to choke the dog to death. Montgomery County Police say that the black cop then took a picture of the dead dog and actually sent it to his girlfriend before dumping the pup in a dumpster.

The four were among dozens caught in a wave of arrests after Nigeria strengthened its criminal penalties for homosexuality with the new Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in January 2014. The men could face further violence in prison if human rights organizations do not come up with an additional fine of 20,000 naira ($120) each meted out by a judge in Bauchi city, Dorothy Aken'Ova, convener of the Coalition for the Defense of Sexual Rights Network, said. The four were sentenced to 15 strokes plus a year's imprisonment if they cannot pay their fines. Aken'Ova said that the men, aged between 20 and 22, should not have been convicted because their confessions were forced by law agents who beat them. She said that they had to lie on the floor of the court to be whipped on their backsides. The men's families, mainly subsistence farmers in rural areas where everyone knows everyone else, refused an offer of legal representation because they preferred to negotiate with the judge and get the case behind them, said Aken'Ova. She said that the families were embarrassed by the stigma attached to homosexuality, which many highly religious Nigerians consider an evil imported from the West. The hearings in Bauchi city, capital of the state of the same name, had been delayed from January 2014, when a crowd tried to stone the accused men outside the court and demanded that the judge pass the death sentence. Security officials had to fire into the air to save the men and disperse the crowd. Under Islamic Shariah law in some north Nigerian states, homosexuals can be sentenced to death by stoning or lethal injection. Aken'Ova, who got her information from the men's families, said that the judge was lenient because the men had promised that the homosexual acts occurred in the past and that they had since changed their ways. For fear of further disruption, Judge El-Yakub Aliyu held hearings unannounced and in secret. He said that the hearing for another four men accused of sodomy would be heard at a later date.

John Blackwell, president-elect of the British Veterinary Association, has argued that the ritual killing of poultry, sheep and cattle by cutting their throats causes unnecessary suffering to animals. Traditionally, Jewish and Islamic slaughter practices involve animals having their throats slit and the blood drained because it is "humane." But Blackwell, who has been accused of "inflaming prejudice" by religious leaders, says that animals must be stunned before the cut because some will be conscious for up to two minutes before death. The Danish government has been accused of religious persecution after it banned the religious slaughter of animals for halal and kosher meat. Blackwell said that the way halal and kosher meat is created, through the throat being slit, resulted in "five or six seconds" of pain for the animal. "They will feel the cut," he said. "They will feel the massive injury of the tissues of the neck. They will perceive the aspiration of blood they will breath in before they lose consciousness." More than 6,000 animals are killed in religious abattoirs every week in Britain. The halal meat market is believed to be worth up to an estimated £2 billion. Charities including Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA also support the move to ban the slaughter of animals without stunning first. Lewis Grant, of the Veterinary Public Health Association, said that cuts left over from animals which have been slaughtered for halal and kosher meat often enter the general meat trade and people do not realise that they are eating it. The Jewish practice of slaughtering animals is known as shechita. Animals must be conscious when killed for the meat to be kosher under Jewish law and halal under Islamic law.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Prosecutors have announced the arrest of 52-year-old Samuel Waldman at his Brooklyn residence. A criminal complaint in federal court in Manhattan charged Waldman with distributing child pornography over the Internet in November 2013 by enabling others to download multiple videos depicting children in sexual acts, including girls ages 4 to 11. Waldman was charged with one count of transporting or distributing child pornography. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison. He was released on $100,000 bond after an initial court appearance. He was also ordered to have no unsupervised contact with children and no employment with access to children.

The group describes how they studied the DNA of 6,815 unrelated people and discovered what they describe as a direct correlation between height and intelligence — taller people are smarter, they say. While the team's study results are likely to cause quite a stir, particularly among those lower in physical stature, it does add to a growing body of research that suggests there are physical, mental and in some cases emotional differences between people related to body size (both height and girth). In this effort, the team used data obtained from Generation Scotland: Scottish Family Health Study — where both medical tests and mental aptitude were tested — intelligence was measured via four basic metrics: mental reaction times, linguistic ability, processing speed and powers of recall. In analyzing data from the study, the team found what they describe as a "significant genetic correlation" between IQ and height — between taller and shorter people. Those that were shorter were on average, found to be slightly less intelligent than their taller counterparts. It's important to note that the researchers are not suggesting that all short people are less intelligent, or that all tall people are more intelligent. Instead they are pointing out averages across a population. Also important to note is that the Family Health Study did not use standard IQ tests to measure intelligence. The research team also claim that 70% of the differences that they found regarding IQ and height could be attributed to genetic factors — the rest could be chalked up to environment. Other studies have found that there exists different health risks for people of different heights — some have found that shorter people, for example, are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, while taller people tend to die younger than shorter people. Studies that have looked for intelligence differences based on height, however, have been few and far between. The researchers in Scotland point out that prior studies have relied mainly on testing people related to one another — theirs, they claim, is the first study to measure people who are completely unrelated.

The remainder ancestry is difficult to assign because the DNA is either shared by a number of different populations around the world, or because it’s from understudied populations, such as Native Americans. Obviously that large “unassigned” percentage means that those “averages” could be higher. Looking at the regional and state-to-state numbers for self-identified Latinos, the differences are striking. For example, some Latinos have no discernible Native American ancestry, while in others have as much as 50% of the ancestry being Native American. Latinos in states in the Southwest, bordering Mexico — New Mexico, Texas, California and Arizona — have the greatest percentage of Native American ancestry. Latinos in states with the largest proportion of African Americans in their population — South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama — have the highest percentage of African Ancestry.

Monday, March 3, 2014

Female genital mutilation comes in many different forms. One type is called suna which involves the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora. The other form is sewing the vagina shut until marriage.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Now, only 63% are white, while 13% are black, 17% are Hispanic and 5% are Asian. In 2050, those shares are projected to be 47% white, 13% black, 28% Hispanic and 8% Asian. In 2011, unmarried women accounted for 41% of U.S. births, up from just 5% in 1960. The rate is 29% for whites, 53% among Hispanics and 72% among African Americans. Although 60% of single mothers have live-in boyfriends, half of these relationships end within five years. Single parenthood’s stigma is gone.